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I’ve had my X61 tablet for about four months now, so it’s time to talk about wear and tear and how battery life looks in regular usage.

In general, it’s the least battered-looking of any laptop I’ve owned at 4 months.  The only externally visible signs that it’s not a brand new laptop are that the screen is usually covered with my grubby fingerprints, and the middle-bottom of the screen has pulled away every so slightly from the plastic cowling above the rotating hinge.  If you look carefully you can see the adhesive has pulled away from the two pieces of plastic. 

Another defect I’ve recently encountered is a broken button on the tablet pen.  At AU$60 replacement cost, I was expecting the tablet pen to be pretty solid.  In general it feels like it is. It feels great and it comes with extra nibs and a piece of circular scrap metal generously described as a nib-remover by the manual, which indicates which part the designers expect to wear out first.  The Achilles heel of the tablet pen is the button on the side which is used for the equivalent of a right mouse click.  The button has a hilariously flimsy plastic bracer to hold it into the pen body. This tiny, fragile, destined-to-fail, bracer, snapped on mine.  No more right-clicks and context menus for me in tablet mode.

I was about to cry into my coffee this morning when my two year old unhelpfully suggested sticky tape.  I was drawing breath to humour her with praise for suggesting her cure-all for anything broken (plates, cars, dead pets, flat batteries) when it occurred to me that it might actually work.  See the image attached for the resurrected pen.  It now feels more solid and clicks more positively than before it broke.

I’ll work on Lenovo to see if my warranty is worth pursuing later in the week.

Practical battery life

I’ve been on a course this week, so I’ve been able to check out a real-life battery longevity scenario. 

Usually I’m only away from power for two or three hours of meeting use, and that hasn’t really tested the battery life near its limits so that isn’t too interesting. 

This week I’ve been in a room from 9am to 4:30pm for two (and a half) days, and managed to get the X61 to last the whole time by plugging in for 45 and 50 minutes at lunch (12:10 to 1pm-ish).  On the course I was taking sporadic notes, and being distracted by one or two projects that were running hot though my instant messengers and email.  I had WPA-2 wireless G connectivity up 100% of the time and I was running Microsoft Outlook 2003, OneNote 2007, MS Office Communicator 2005, Google Talk Firefox  and Word 2007. I was using the tablet lightly enough to have brief IM conversations and answer emails, while still being attentive enough to engage with the instructor and not get thrown out (the course was 8 hours of information crammed into a 3 day course, so sue me for my lack of attention).  I run with about 4 bars of screen brightness, and use a slightly tweaked clone of the power-source-optimised power profile.

On day 1 ended at 4:30 with 37 minutes of battery left according to the battery meter, and on day 2 we ended closer to 4:10pm and I had 50 minutes of battery left according to the same source.

My X61’s battery is a 4.55 Amp Hour 8-cell Sanyo Lithium Ion (FRU 93P5032 in Lenovo parts speak).  Better longevity than I expected.